Video Editing

There is 3 different parts to editing.

• the development of editing 
• the purpose of editing 
• the conventions and techniques of editing. 

because of editing the development of movies has been upgraded so much in the last 10 years and also how much editing software has evolved over the years. 

The origins of cinema link back to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge was born in kingston upon times England, he first started his career as a photographer, he became well known for his pioneering work in motion photography, he changed his name from Edward james muggeridge to eadweard muybridge because it make him feel more anglo-saxon when he was just a young man he emergrated to the united states of america, one of his most well known pieces of work was animal locomotion in 1877-1878.

his main interest was in how things moved. he used a sequence of cameras to create still images which when he played them back a a certain speed he discovered they made the illusion that the still images were actually moving, if you play a series of connected image back to back at 24 frames per second it tricks the brain into thinking the images are actually moving at 24fps which would make a illusion that the images are moving this also makes the brain think that its isn't a series of images it is just a moving image instead of being a series of images.

it is really important to understand that the idea of both frames and frame rates, we use frame rate to adjust the speed of the image in post and pre production. 

here is some of the work of Eadweard muybridge, 

the first cameras were just a role of film which was just moved mechanically across the shutter and past the lens system, these cameras were invented in france by the lumiere brothers but at the same time in america Thomas Edison was about to hit the same point in history that the lumiere brothers.

when the first movies that were created with these cameras the movies that were shot were not edited, the shots that were took from the cameras were just usually a single shot from one point of view.

before they had editing they didnt think about doing multiple shots because they would have no way off putting the different clips and different shots into smooth transactions, when they first started shooting they shot there clips in order so when played back everything was in order so none of it needed editing.

editing in camera still exists as a way of creating many films. a lot of people still do this and there is a big section in some of the big film festivals of films that have been edited in camera, you can visit the site www.straight8.net/ this is a competition with different filmakers shoot and edit the full movie in the camera on a single 8mm film cartridge. some of the main examples of the main history of editing camera started in 1902 when there was a shot of a 1902 american fire fighter



editing in camera let film makers do alot more shots and angels and help the world see things from more than one point of view.

insert own in camera edit need to get off clive and if i forget hi clive please remind me cheers


editing in camera would never have been good enough because it is pretty hard to create a finished film with in camera editing because if you make mistakes you need to delete the clip and re take the full clip which takes longer using editing software to Finnish your film correctly.

in the early days of movie production they thought of the idea of taking the film that they had shot and cut it with scissors and then taped the film back together which was really the first type of editing after the shot this can be done by hand or the help of a machine this type of editing linear editing.

from the early 1920s untill after the second world war film editing was done exclusively on movolio decks these decks were used until  1945 the German company steenbeck introduced machine which became the industry standard.

film cutting still exists to this day the steenbeck company still create, produce and still sell this film editing machine which still can be bought by visiting this webpage www.steenbeck.com/indexphp


These are to of the video editing machines the original designs were first created over 60 years ago if it wasn't for the German company for creating this amazing piece of technology the film editing wouldn't be as good as it is today. these editing machines are for to different  film sizes the little black one is for 32mm film and the bigger white one is for 8mm film the progress these machines helped with making editing easier is so unbeliveable how far we have come from these machines to the programmes we use now to edit our movies.


invention of video editing

in 1951 the idea of recording to something other than film was come across by the amex research team and after this just a short period after became the first video editing machines in 1956,

the original editing systems were also linear editing systems but instead of physically cutting the film the machine took the film and copied it onto a control; point which would control the in and out points of (start and Finnish)

this is the ampex - vr 1000 this was first created in 1956 this was the first practical, broadcast quailty recorder which could actually record at 15 inches per second but because of the quadrupole heads running on rotating drum gives it a recording speed of roughly 1560 inches per second which made this a whole lot better and more safisticated than all the other technology they had before this came out.



at this point in time the quality of the images caught and edited were very primative, this was mainly used for the use of televsion purposes because the quality of the viedo wasnt exactly good enough to be used in the cinema.

the first feature film that was first shot on video was 1947 by two women called julie and julia. the first commercial shot in hd was in 2004 and it was called once upon a time in mexico.




this is a trailor of the first movie ever shot in HD and this film was created in 2004 the name of this feature film is once upon a time in mexico i try to find a good copy of  the trailer but this is the best one i could find the quality of the video isn't really that good.

Non-linear editing systems (nle)

in the 1970s was  the first attempts to create a non linear editing system but the systems that everyone was working on weren't been brought into the commercial market but then in the 1980s a company called lucas film started to develop a system with their own software editdriod which was a system that was based around a laser disc technology but sadly they never got this into the commercial system.but the first commercially  successful nle system was introduced in 1989 when a company called avid launched the avid 1 media composer the system that they created was hard ware and software which was first put onto a apple computer, which was a good addition to the apple production line for having this software on there pc, this was the first computer based editing software that had come out which made this a better piece of soft ware this program made video tape into files. with this the film was been able to be put on to a time line and edited. then became the creation of digital cameras, the sony d1 was the first professionally camera that came on to the market in 1986.

this allowed linear and none linear film to be all digital and not need of film or video because this allowed it all to be taken and out digital which ment the shots that were taken could be edited without destroying the original file this was called none destructive editing.

because the technology had come so far they were able to do so many things that they couldn't when it linear editing systems for example they could manipulate the images which was such a huge step from linear systems.


the purpose of editing, is to take the parts that havent been sucseful in shot you can always take out the mistakes that were made and correct them in the editing software by replaceing or cutting the scene short, it is also used for when there is a different shot and to stop it just skipping and jumping from one clip to another which makes things go so much smoother and make it look more proffesional.

it doesnt matter what type of genre the film is that is been editied when it has finished been editing it still gives off the same finished story which makes effective story telling at its finest.

we create the effective story telling by changing the point of view (POV) of the audience to get them more involved with the story, when we shoot the  production we need to get the exact shots that we need to edit them in to the perfect storyline.






as you can see by the short movie that i have got off youtube, you can tell that the genre of this short movie is a horror movie this is so obvious because as soon as the screen loads up you can see the establishing shot is from a distance the house (establishing shot) is the only place with all the lights on every were else around the house is pitch black, then on the next shot there is a lonely women sat in the dark in her house on the phone while she is watching a movie and the movie just happens to be a horror movie. so just as the movie starts up you can tell straight away that this is some type of horror movie. The style and content of the movie make it obvious of what type of movie genre this is from the start its all building up to a horror movie.



Pace and rhythm


combing shots




this shot is shot-reverse-shot (180 degrees) this shot is very common when there is two people having a conversation what happends in this shot is the camera will be focused on one person from a POV and then it will skip to the other person who is sat oppiste the person who is talking and the camera will do 180 degrees to do a sharp look at the other person. which is called shot-reverse-shot




this is a montage of loads of different clips from the same movie and in the movie you can see the young lad who struggles to train at the begning is getting fitter and you can see the change in his body as the montage gets closer to the end this montage is taking from a movie called never back down which is a brilliant movie if a can just add that in there.

this is a screenshot of me inserting a in and out point into my edit of our college short movie i waited until i got to the point i wanted my scene to start and then i clicked the I button for it to select the in point and when i wanted my clip to end i simply pushed the O for my out point in the clip.

this is how to add a dissolve video transaction, this is the way i added a dissolve video transaction i selected the two clips and put them close together and then i selected the part joining them together and when it highlighted i selected the effects button and then i video transactions,dissolve then i can choose a dissolve technique i want to use to make my clip have a short transaction.

this is how i inserted a wipe transaction into 2 different clips to make the clips change from one to another nice and smoothly